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Pakistan

The confrontation between Ukraine and Russia has grabbed the headlines recently but it can only be understood in a more global context in which we are seeing a constant sharpening of military tensions and open conflicts across a very considerable portion of the planet.

After using Bin Laden in the role of Bad Guy for nearly ten years it was time to get rid of him in order not to appear completely impotent. In doing so the USA proved that it is the only power with the military, technological and logistical means to carry out this kind of operation

Once again, war has broken out between India and Pakistan in Kashmir. Once again, the bourgeoisie has pushed workers in uniform to die and to kill each other at altitudes and climatic conditions where men may die even without war. While soldiers kill each other, populations living near the borders have been uprooted and turned into refugees. Condemned to poverty and misery even without war, they suffer in open-air camps at temperatures below zero.

Since last many decades two contending gangs of the capitalist class have been busy shedding blood of exploited population of Jammu and Kashmir in the name of ‘national unity’ on the one hand and “liberation“ of Kashmir on the other. This has long turned this ‘valley of roses’ into a valley of death, devastation, poverty and chaos... And yet, the fact is the working class in Kashmir has tried determinedly to assert itself, especially over the last couple of years, and have gone on a number of major strikes and struggles.

This report represents an effort by the ICC's sections in Asia to come to grips with the specificities of imperialist tensions in Asia, and in particular as far as they concern the rising powers of China and India.

A few days before President Zardari of Pakistan was to meet President
Obama, Taliban are said to have taken over Buner. Immediately a scare was set: Taliban
are coming to Islamabad; they are just 60 kilometer away; they may take over
Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal. As Zardari took the flight for the US on 5th
May, the Pakistani army asked people in Swat and elsewhere to quit their homes
and go into refugee camps...

There is an accelerating slide into chaos in Pakistan. The US has a real fear of the consequences of a collapse of the civil administration. In particular there is the question of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. The US has belligerently asserted that it would invade to secure the bases, if it felt it served its interests.

The British government has been embarrassed by revelations that it has used ‘torture by proxy'. It was alleged that part of the UK's secret service, MI5, was involved in questioning suspects while they were being tortured by the secret services of Pakistan and the United States.

The horrific attacks on people in Mumbai, at a hospital, in a café and hotels, at a Jewish centre, and at random bystanders in a railway station, was soon headlined "India's 9/11" across the world.This comparison had a definite significance: it contains the implicit threat that India's status as ‘victim' would be used to justify putting pressure on, or even renewing conflict with, Pakistan.

From a working class point of view denouncing the terrorist attacks on people in Mumbai and the repression of the Indian state is the absolute ABC of class politics. To oppose the division of the working class and reject support for any imperialism is a fundamental responsibility for revolutionaries. In contrast to this internationalist approach the Socialist Workers Party has made it very clear which side of the Indo-Pakistan conflict it supports.

Given that the Islamabad government has no control over huge border areas, and the increasing dangerousness of everyday life, we can see the real descent into barbarism. That it has been degenerating into daily violence - bomb attacks, shootings and their subsequent reprisals - should come as no surprise. The ‘war on terror' has, in reality, meant ‘more war and more terror'.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto, whoever carried it out, is just one more example
of how the ruling class conducts its politics and settles its differences just
like gangsters. But this would only be secondary in the life of the bourgeoisie
if it did not take place within a dramatic context which opens the way to
growing chaos whose main victims will be the population in general and the
working class in particular.

Since we wrote about Pakistan in
the last edition of WR, Pervez Musharraf has ceremoniously handed over command
of the Pakistani military to his protégé General Ashfaq Kayani (thereby meeting
one of the key demands of the USA) and also allowed former Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif to re-enter the country (after throwing him out at his last attempted
return in September).

Martial law has been declared in Pakistan,
the culmination of all the conflicts that have been going on within the state
since the summer. This appears to have been precipitated by the fears that the
High Court might rule Musharraf ineligible for his re-election as president
last month, and he has finally replaced the Chief Justice with one of his own
men, something he tried and failed to do in August when he pulled back from
declaring a state of emergency...

Terrorists attacked the sleeping passengers in the Smajhauta express or the ‘peace express’ in the late night hours of 18th February07. Several coaches of the express train were set on fire 100 kilometers away from the Indian capital by the incendiary devices planted by terrorists. 67 persons including many children were killed on the spot. 15 persons were injured, 12 of them very seriously. Most of the killed are reported to be Pakistani nationals.

Kashmir
is known as the heaven on earth in popular parlance. The recent
earthquake in the morning of eighth October-2005 has turned this
heaven into a hell and valley of death. Both the governments of Pakistan and India are not
in a position to put the correct figures and the figures of
casualties and homeless people are being increased with every passing
day, reflecting the sheer inefficiency, inability to reach the
devastated areas and the victims, and the insensitivity of both
ruling cliques in both the capitalist states.

The threat of war between nuclear powers casts a terrifying shadow across the whole world. It is not an empty threat, an episode of sabre-rattling where India and Pakistan will just go to the brink before ‘seeing sense’ and coming to an agreement. “The British and American Governments are seriously contemplating a doomsday scenario in which there is an unstoppable momentum toward a nuclear war in India and Pakistan that would kill millions of people and make millions more homeless across the sub-continent” (The Times, 1/6/02). In an inferior position - Pakistan has 700,000 troops to India’s 1.2 million, 25 nuclear missiles with a lesser range than India’s 60 - “Pakistan has already made it clear that, in the face of a superior enemy, it would be prepared to initiate a nuclear confrontation” (Guardian 23/5/2). British “diplomatic and defence sources” have suggested that neither President Musharraf of Pakistan nor Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee “appeared to be taking into account the sheer scale of the disaster that would follow if nuclear weapons were used, and that they seemed incapable of visualising the disaster that would overwhelm their countries as a result” (The Times, 1/6/2). While “military sources” felt that “neither leader was thinking logically or with any common sense” (ibid), in reality it is a gruesome illustration of the insane logic of the imperialist appetites of the ruling class. Here we have the ruling classes of two countries, where poverty, disease and death stalk the majority of the population daily, setting in motion theie blame for all this with ‘religious fundamentalism’. The Indian ruling class blames Pakistan-backed Islamic fundamentalists for terrorist attacks in Kashmir and on the Indian parliament. On the other side, the Pakistan ruling class blames the fervent nationalism of the Hindu fundamentalism of the ruling BJP party in India, in particular with its brutal counter-insurgency against ‘freedom fighters’ in Kashmir. As for the ‘democratic’ and ‘civilised’ bourgeoisie in the West, they weep crocodile tears about the ‘intransigence’ of the leaders of both countries and call on them to be ‘reasonable’ and seek peace under the guidance of the leaders of the very countries, such as Britain and the US, that train and provide the weaponry for their armed forces.

War today has become a permanent feature of daily life under capitalism the world over. Since the Gulf War, the world working class has again and again been confronted with the reality of war � numerous wars in Africa and Yugoslavia, the war in Kosovo, the Chechen war, the war in Afghanistan and now the war drive in India and Pakistan where two nations with nuclear weapons are at each others’ throats.

The October military coup in Pakistan marked a serious intensification of instability in South Asia. The new military leader General Pervaiz Musharraf reassured the 'international community' about his peaceful intentions and the military's determination to try and rescue the collapsing economy and to fight endemic corruption. But, this was only cover for a bitter struggle within the Pakistani bourgeoisie, above all over imperialist strategy.

In the middle of 2002 there were intensive war preparations in the Indian subcontinent. Both the Indian and the Pakistani ruling cliques were on the verge of open war. Both these imperialist states resorted to an unprecedented mobilisation of arms, ammunition and soldiers on the international borders between the two countries. Both sides mobilised one million soldiers armed to the teeth with all sorts of lethal weapons. Threatening statements about using nuclear weapons were issued by some sections of the political authorities in both countries. The Indian bourgeoisie proved to be much more aggressive and seemed to be bent on going towards open war in response to the more hidden war through terrorist activities sponsored by the bourgeoisie of Pakistan. But the pressure of the 'international community', particularly the US, compelled the Indian bourgeoisie to call a temporary halt to the march to war.